As a company, we hold the belief that empirical, quantitative data should be the main, if not only, source of data utilized to gauge a student’s admissions chances and whether a student’s college list (when taken as a whole) is overly aggressive, not aggressive enough, or “just right.”
How to find out what your chances might be at a given University based on GPA and SAT/ACT scores:
1. If you go to a private school or certain public schools in Atlanta, Naviance software is available that shows you how past students have fared.
2. If your school does not have Naviance, you can use proxies such as Cappex.com instead that do roughly the same thing (although not localized to students from your high school). See a sample graph of what these Naviance and Cappex graphs look like here.
While grades and SAT/ACT aren’t the only two variables considered for admission, they constitute the majority of the equation for most schools and give you a solid starting point for where you currently stand at a given school.
Vanderbilt Case Study:
Vanderbilt’s Class of 2017 Admissions Statistics were released on their blog this morning and make for an excellent case study.
Edison Prep has long told its clients that Vanderbilt University, far and away, gets the least respect of any University in the country when it comes to the sheer difficulty of getting in. As one of the few elite universities that isn’t in a frigid area of the country, every year, Vandy gets more and more qualified applicants who on a quantitative basis (class rank and SAT/ACT scores) far surpass the academic statistics of several Ivy League schools and almost every other school in the US News Rankings.
Here’s the profile of Vanderbilt’s Admitted Students in 2017 – Regular Decision:
Regular Decision Applicants: 27,840 Admitted: 3,018 (10.8%) Average Class Rank: Top 3.39% Top 10% Class Rank: 95%+ of students were in the top 10% of their graduating class Middle 50% SAT (Reading): 740 – 800 (out of 800) Middle 50% SAT (Math): 750 – 800 (out of 800) Middle 50% ACT: 33 – 35 (out of 36)What does this mean, in English?
At least 25% of admitted students had a perfect score in SAT Critical Reading.
At least 25% of admitted students had a perfect score in SAT Math.
Vandy’s Middle 50% SAT and ACT ranges are higher than Harvard’s (Harvard: 700-800 Reading, 690-790 Math, and 32-35 ACT).
Given that all colleges schools must field a football team, Senators’ kids can and will apply, and all the other set-asides that exist, much of that 5% who were not in the top 10% of their class is already spoken for before the admissions game even begins. Class rank is paramount.
What does this mean? Should I give up?
No. This does not mean that people should give up. Remember, 75% of those admitted did not have 800s on SAT Reading or SAT Math.
Here are the takeaways:
Students should begin researching their potential college lists early and build a comprehensive college list that includes Safeties, Targets, and Reaches. Unless your name is Sasha or Malia, virtually nobody can consider a school like Vanderbilt in any category other than “Reach.”
In our experience, far more of our students get denied because of poor GPA, class rank and rigor of curriculum than SAT/ACT scores. In almost all cases, your student shouldn’t be touching the SAT/ACT until sophomore year is over. For students wanting to apply to top 50 schools, freshman and sophomore years should be about one thing: getting great grades in rigorous core courses (e.g. Honors/AP if available).
That said, waiting until late in junior year to take the SAT/ACT “cold” is a very, very risky idea. Taking a diagnostic mock SAT and/or ACT the summer before junior year and making a battle plan accordingly is always the wisest option.
Source for the above info: Vandy Admissions Blog
P.S. Hat tip to Michael for the link!
https://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/An-Admissions-Case-Study.webp6661000Edison Prephttps://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Edison_Prep-logo.pngEdison Prep2023-03-23 10:25:502023-07-13 12:15:19An Admissions Case Study: Vanderbilt University’s Mind-boggling Class of 2017
https://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/uga.webp6661000Edison Prephttps://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Edison_Prep-logo.pngEdison Prep2022-11-18 17:01:082024-04-29 11:30:55Edison Prep’s Famous UGA Admissions Data and Strategy Page — Tracking UGA Stats Since 2012!
Just a few months before covid, the ACT announced a bevy of upcoming changes, such as the ability of students to do single-section ACT testing, increased options for digital ACT testing, and the ability to report an “ACT superscore” directly from the ACT, which we covered in our October 2019 blog post.
In that blog post, we mentioned that most of the new features slated to debut were not of much use, with the very notable exception of superscore reporting, which was a breath of fresh air and common sense in the often-confusing college admissions process.
At long last, after some small covid delays, ACT superscore reporting is now here! Superscore reporting allows students to avoid the cost and burden of sending multiple sets of ACT scores to colleges by rolling it up directly and sending a student’s ACT superscore on an ACT score report.
What is Superscoring?
Superscoring is a process that allows students to combine their best individual section scores from multiple test dates, thus improving their overall ACT “super-score, which is calculated by simply averaging the best subject scores (English, math, reading, and science) across all the ACTs a student has taken.
Since many students take the test 2-3 times, it’s not uncommon for a student’s score to go up 1-3+ points when superscoring is included. Additionally, students can save time by focusing solely on their lower section scores if they have lopsided section scores on an initial test. In the example below, the student has a 25 without superscoring, but has a 27 with superscoring, since 26.75 rounds up to a 27. Thus, with superscoring, the student would gain two points.
Example:
A Bit of Superscoring History:
Colleges superscoring the ACT has gone from a rarity a decade ago to the norm today, with over 66% of major colleges and universities now superscoring the ACT, and more joining each year (e.g. Emory and Vanderbilt in 2021). The benefits of this automatic superscoring will only grow as the practice becomes ever-more prevalent.
Historically, the SAT has been superscored at 90%+ of schools. The ACT was initially not superscored at many colleges because, decades ago, the ACT had asked colleges not to do so, and colleges obliged. However, the ACT conducted extensive research in 2019 to see whether a student’s single-day ACT score or ACT superscore better predicted their success in college, and the results were clear: an ACT superscore was a better indicator.
April 2021: ACT Debuts Automatic Superscoring:
Beginning in April 2021, the ACT announced that superscoring would be automatically integrated into every student’s official ACT score report. Superscoring kicks in automatically as soon as a student has two or more scores with which to superscore.
As admissions offices become ever-more digital in an attempt to speed up application review in this era of ballooning application numbers, automatic superscoring will be a welcome time-saver for admissions offices by removing a step and may push some colleges that were on the fence to begin superscoring.
Example: What ACT Superscoring looks like when students login to their accounts:
“But what about Auburn? And what about Zell Miller?”
ACT’s new endorsement of superscoring does not mean that colleges will have to accept them. Every college makes its own choice, as does the Georgia legislature that sets policies regarding the Zell Miller Scholarship.
The institutions that have been historically most hesitant to superscore have done so at a healthy detriment to their published ACT score averages, but for a very good reason: they are often the same colleges that have published merit aid grids tied to GPA + ACT scores, such as Auburn, Alabama, and Arizona. Superscoring the ACT might well mean Auburn having to give us non-Alabama-tax-paying Georgians an extra $20 million+ per year!
The popular Zell Miller HOPE Scholarship (“Full HOPE”) also requires an ACT of 26 or 1200 on a single day, and will likely continue to do so, since approximately 300% as many students likely have a 26 superscore than a single-day score of 26.
This morning, we woke up to over 45 parents and college counselors texting us articles about the ACT’s press release regarding some changes as it relates to superscoring, the ability to re-take just certain sections of a test, and the bigger push to allow students to take the ACT online (on a computer) at a test site beginning in Sept. 2020. As full-time professionals in the trenches of the ACT, we have opinions, and, unsurprisingly, what you read in the press release is what the ACT would like you to take away. At first glance, these three combined announcements seem to overwhelmingly favor students.
However, today’s press release is mostly one very positive note on superscoring mixed with a bevy of precautionary notes that are important for parents to understand about the online ACT and section re-testing.
Summary of Changes: 1) Students who have taken the test more than once will be provided with an ACT superscore on their actual score report. The good news in the press release is this single bullet point.
2) Students who have taken the full-length ACT before will be allowed to re-take just certain sections of the exam now…but only online, not on paper. Students must have already completed a full-length real ACT on an earlier exam date (paper or online format) to be eligible for section testing. Section retesting will also only be available on the “big seven” national test dates; it’s not available for state testing or school district testing. For reasons that will be explained below, that makes section retesting mostly a non-starter.
3) Students will be allowed to take the test online at limited test sites beginning in September 2020, with a further expansion at a later date. ACT exams taken via the online format will come back in two days, rather than 10 days for the current paper test. This digital format has existed in pilot form since 2015. The online version contains an identical number of questions, content, and timing. It will be conducted on secure school-administered computers at test sites.
Deep Analysis and Strategic Implications: 1) The decision to cleanly and simply include the superscore on the ACT score report is a huge win for students, families, and logic. Currently, only about 55-60% of major schools super-score the ACT, whereas 90%+ of schools superscore the SAT, an unfair difference in treatment that has never made sense. The ACT already encourages colleges to superscore the test (see link here), and a few more colleges begin superscoring the ACT each year. Families who currently spend lots of money during the application process in order to send scores from multiple ACT exam dates in order to get the benefit of superscoring may save meaningful money because of this change.
One note of caution: It remains to be seen if colleges and scholarship agencies that don’t wish to superscore will simply ignore the big shiny superscore that the new ACT score report will provide and simply use the single-day score instead. (Auburn, with your generous automatic ACT score cutoffs for scholarship dollars for us Georgians, we’re looking at you…) This very particular wording from the ACT FAQ is the one that makes us curious as to whether schools that currently don’t superscore the ACT will keep their current policy:
2) For as long as the paper-based test is allowed, students should stick with the paper test. The reasons are manifold:
A) Students do not adequately value how important being able to write and annotate directly on the paper test is. Students have a much harder time finishing the digital format of the ACT than the paper-based version. The ACT is a test for which the math, reading, and science sections are difficult to finish in time for most students. The online format makes it harder to leverage the pre-printed diagrams and tables on the Science section, the scratchwork and geometry diagrams on the math section, and the annotation of reading passages. All of this adds greatly to a student’s speed when taken on paper, and for the reading and science sections, almost every single extra question correct or incorrect is an entire point, so the implications are immediate and large. The parents we work with who have taken the GMAT or GRE in its online format understand how clunky and slow writing on a separate piece of paper and re-drawing geometry diagrams is. Furthermore, students retain information far better on paper than on a screen, as has been documented in numerous articles like this one.
B) Students who have previously taken the full-length ACT and wish to take advantage of the new feature of taking just certain sections of the test again rather than the whole test can only do so via the computer version.The time that students lose by taking it on a computer far outweighs any perceived stamina issues that a student may gain by being able to take just one or two sections while “fresh.” Short-sighted students may hastily try to save two hours and 15 minutes on a Saturday morning but spite their score in the process by doing the online format.
C) We have seen firsthand proof the damage that a digital ACT format can have on student scores relative to the same test given in paper format. There are one or two schools in Atlanta who, back in 2015, were oddly eager to make their entire student bodies digital guinea pigs. We worked with a number of those students whose schools recklessly mandated that they take the online format. Our sample size is not thousands, but our students from those schools had extreme problems finishing without being able to annotate like they were used to. At best, some matched their homework test scores. Most fell 2-4 points ACT relative to their most recent homework test the week before the exam. They all noted that the exam wasn’t harder, just that they had no chance of finishing like they did on their paper-based homework tests, which were all real, full-length national ACTs.
D) The online testing appeals far more to the ACT and to high school superintendents than high schoolers. Whenever an article regarding digital testing has come out from ACT over the last five years, in order to keep our pulse on the state of 16-year-olds, we’ve asked our students in class if they would like the idea of taking the online ACT with the exact same timing structure (no extra time given for the fact that you can’t write on the test). Like clockwork, over 90% said that losing the ability to write on the actual booklet would kill their timing (“especially math, omg can you imagine!”) and said paper was their preference. Sadly, some high school administrators who want to look like they’re “innovative” will likely push this new shiny object to students’ detriment.
Meanwhile, students who have good advising from their tutors and/or nerdy peers at high-performing high schools will likely stick with the paper format and avoid the digital score hit.
E) The biggest struggle will be parents and tutors getting students to understand that their desire for 2-day online test scoring (immediate gratification) instead of paper-based score results in 10 days is very much “haste makes waste.” The higher up the ACT score spectrum students get, especially in math, the greater the impact the inability to physically write in their test booklets will be. The paper vs. online disconnect will exist, but in a more muted way, in the 1-23 ACT score range, where students are already allowed to miss 75-80 questions and still earn a 23, and where a large part of the coaching is primarily “let’s work on being really accurate on 70% of questions you understand / can get to.”
F) There are no official online practice tests with the new format that simulate the look and feel of the application students will be logging into on test day. Students need to be able to play with the look and feel of the “ACT OS” from the very beginning of the prep. The online offerings that the ACT has produced thus far, such as their free online prep resource “ACT Academy,” have been widely ridiculed by educators across the spectrum. Check out some humorous annotated photos showing the ACT Academy’s shameful inadequacy here and here and here and here and here and here and here, courtesy of our tutor friend James Murphy.
G) IT issues and power outages will occur. We take the test each year, and have personally taken the SAT and ACT a combined 30+ times, and during two of those times, there have been brief power outages. Internet and power outage issues will be messy and impossible to avoid. This has been a common complaint by international students who were all forced onto the online format en masse last year (link).
H) Students win via “happy accidents.” Even if a student finds a test center that magically has digital test seats available for taking it on one section and somehow can overcome the speed challenges on digital vs. paper, students who retake the test while focusing on one section (e.g. math) often have “happy accidents” where they get points on the retest from areas they don’t expect when the pressure is off plus natural volatility on test day. Additionally, not all schools will even accept section re-tests (likely not even a majority). Thus, unless someone already has an oddball distribution like 36 English/28 Math/36 Reading/36 Science, taking the full-length test is smarter for most students.
3) It remains to be seen how much the high schools that host the test are even willing to put up with the added hassles of offering the online test. The ACT noted that the online format is initially only going to be available “at select sites” in Sept. 2020 and beyond. It’s hard enough to get high schools to even serve as hosts for the existing paper-and-pencil test centers, especially for the summer tests, so the number of high schools that will be eager to pony up computer labs as well is likely to be very tiny. Additionally, as we all know, computer labs at various high schools are not equally well-equipped (some will have old, obsolete machines), which would make jockeying for “better” test sites even more important. Finally, some of the larger ACT test sites currently have 200+ students taking the test on the same day. Do most high schools have computer lab / computer capacity of 200+? Most do not.
Conclusion:
To be clear, once the ACT goes digital-only – it will be forced on us eventually – we will adapt our book, our pedagogy, and our curriculum to adjust. We’re already the only SAT/ACT firm in Atlanta who revises its curriculum every year.
However, from a strategic standpoint, as long as both options remain available, savvy, well-advised families nationwide will stick to paper-and-pencil testing. The proof is already there in the data from the failed digital pilot students we’ve had since 2015, the 2018 international students who concur, and the common sense outlined above.
When the May 16th Wall Street Journal article about the College Board’s so-called “adversity index” came out, it broke the internet for a few days. We received over 90 phone calls, emails, and texts about it in a three-day span, and we’re just a two-person company.
Most tutors we know waited for the smoke to clear before taking a public stance, since many of the first articles that dropped after the big WSJ article would inevitably contain “hot takes” from freshly-minted journalists rushing to make deadline at the cost of clarity and accuracy; misquotes were inevitable. So we waited.
Now that initial reactions have tempered, we wanted to offer a few of our thoughts regarding the College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard (ECD) that are a bit different than the initial crush of articles and thinkpieces that our clients likely read in the mainstream media.
It comes down to this: Many of the articles that have been written make it sound like the ECD is going to have a huge positive impact or a huge negative impact, but we just see it as an often-weaker route to what colleges are already doing (and will continue to do).
The ECD could potentially impact four key pieces of the admissions process: 1) Maintaining Yield: Colleges that care to have and use this kind of demographic information already do, and have for some time, and often with much greater precision than the blunt census tract data, GreatSchools.org data, and other data that mostly exists on “high school profile” documents that are sent with applicants’ transcripts (the very same data that populates most of the ECD). Many colleges also have long-running, multi-million dollar contracts and even custom-built proprietary software they’ve created with pricey enrollment consultants who use “big data” and help them massage the applicant class to help them build the desired class blend by major, gender, state of residence, financial ability to pay, and other demographic variables. There will be some universities that don’t have the resources or desire to create or maintain such a system on their own; those schools may find this new tool very useful. Undershooting or overshooting a school’s desired matriculation numbers (“yield”) can be a seven- or eight-figure mistake, and many admissions officers lose their jobs the day after the “Deposit Day” of May 1st, just like in college football, based on those outcomes. Yield projection is big business, with big consequences.
2) Reading Scores With Context: Colleges admissions officers already read all applications for “context” without the assistance of this new tool. Edison Prep has had students from over 140 very different high schools hailing from over 25 of Georgia’s counties and over 7 states in the last year. When we hear admissions decisions from past clients, we see widely disparate results based upon students’ profiles. Our lowest-scoring student who got into Vanderbilt this year earned a 27 on the ACT, while our highest scoring student who was denied from Vanderbilt (and Early Decision to boot!) had a perfect 36, as will be the case every year. The two students had similar GPA and rigor statistics, but very little else in common beyond the big GPA/ACT numbers. Those two students’ contexts were extremely different. The reason? Aside from the occasional student who might apply to the University of Montana from Atlanta, most colleges already have detailed, laser-precision dossiers on each high school: the types of students, the relative level of grade inflation and deflation, number of AP courses offered, and historical look-back data at how well students from High School X did once enrolled at their institution. The famous 80/20 rule may even be the 90/10 rule at many colleges, where 90% of their applicants will likely hail from well under 10% of high schools in the US, which leads to familiarity with high schools over time.
3) Financial Stewardship: Colleges are still businesses that have to keep the lights on. Brian used to work in hospital administration, and it’s a fact that unless XX% of a hospital’s patients have Blue Cross or Cigna, it’s impossible for the hospital to financially break even, much less provide assistance to those with Medicaid or charity care. This is analogous to colleges when enrolling their classes. In this analogy, Blue Cross is full-pay students and Medicaid and charity care represent those with financial need. Edison Prep’s founders are grateful for the full-pay students at our alma mater who sometimes had inferior stats and/or questionable Division III athletic talents, but whose financial contributions allowed Washington University in St. Louis to cover 100% of our personal college costs. All but the most well-endowed universities are extremely “tuition-driven” and rely on those all-important full-pay students to make the ship run.
4) Maintaining the Status Quo: The ECD score could come meaningfully into play if the Supreme Court strikes down the usage of affirmative action in college admissions. The College Board strategically avoided any race or ethnicity information in its ECD calculations. All of us in the industry observed what happened to the entering classes at the UC system’s most elite universities after California’s Proposition 209 banning the use of race in admissions was passed back in 1996, recovering somewhat over the last 23 years, but not fully (See page 22). If this occurs, the ECD would likely allow colleges not to radically change what they’re doing, but simply maintain the “reading for context” status quo.
Edison Prep is always looking for ways to increase the efficiency of your student’s studying, such as:
1) Revising our books each year to reflect changing tendencies in the test’s content (e.g. SAT now has box and whisker plots, but didn’t use to. Both tests used to have 3-D distance problems several times per year, but no longer do).
2) Probing students re: their potential college lists so that we can understand what portion of the colleges will superscore, and assign precisely targeted homework accordingly.
This month, we are introducing “Formula Box” lock screens for your student’s phone!
We’ve created custom-sized “lock screens” / backgrounds for the most common cell phone models to help your student memorize key geometry formulas more effectively! Depending on the specific exam date, up to 10 questions per test utilize the formulas from the famous “Formula Box!” Students who make it their lock screen for just 2-3 days will have it memorized! Even among our highest-scoring students, too often we’ll see a sheepish look after a student misses Question #1 because he/she flipped the formula for the circumference of a circle vs. the area of a circle.
Your student can download the specific version of the image for his/her cell phone model here: www.edisonprep.com/formula-box/
When we’re preparing students for the ACT, we always tell them that the ACT English section needs to carry the weight for the ACT Math section because it’s objectively as hard to get a 29 on the Math section as a 34-36 on the English section. There are a multitude of reasons for this. First, there are roughly 40 key grammar rules versus 600+ possible math concepts that need to be learned/memorized, as they can be combined in any number of creative ways to create math problems. Thus, it requires many more math practice tests to achieve the fluency and speed needed at the highest level of the math curve. Second, English is the easiest section to complete within the time restrictions; many students don’t finish the math section. We often get skeptical looks when we tell parents about this English/Math chasm.
The ACT just released its comprehensive National and State-by-State report for the Class of 2018, and as you’ll see in the image below, it’s not a mirage. Our data shows it, and we see it and live it, as the only tutors in the state who take the test each year (or ever). The Georgia snapshot below shows just how over-represented high ACT English scores are relative to high ACT Math scores and matches up with our data and the data seen by our full-time professional tutoring colleagues in Boston, DC and elsewhere. For example, a top 7% English score in Georgia was 33, whereas the same top 7% score on Math in Georgia would be a 29 — 4 points lower! The exact same English/Math chasm can be seen for Reading and Science, whereby top Reading scores are much more common than top Science scores. Oftentimes we will see a student who perceives himself/herself as a “math/science kid” surprised that Math and Science were the lowest two sections on an initial ACT mock test. Knowing that those two sections have far fewer top scorers period, and that it’s difficult to finish those two sections without meaningful practice, should be illuminating.
Que (Photo by Rob Saye)
Strategic impact for students applying to UGA:
Since UGA utilizes just the ACT’s English and Math sections in its admissions review, that means that most savvy UGA applicants should focus on getting an eye-popping score on English and a “good enough” score on math. Roughly 90% of our 3,000+ students admitted to UGA over the past decade have had an English section score that is at least 5+ points higher than the Math score for that reason. We’ll see 20-30 perfect 36’s on English for every one perfect 36 on Math.
National snapshot for the 1.9 million ACT tests taken by the Class of 2018:
Georgia snapshot for the 56,000 ACT tests taken in Georgia by the Class of 2018:
This issue isn’t a Georgia-specific issue, but a national one. If you want to “nerd out” with the data, here are some detailed links:
https://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/data.webp6661000Edison Prephttps://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Edison_Prep-logo.pngEdison Prep2018-12-10 17:28:162023-07-14 10:46:18Breaking Down the ACT Score Data from the Official 2018 National and Georgia Score Reports
Today, the College Board released the annual national report for the SAT for the Class of 2018, which contained a variety of data about this past year’s test takers. Various websites and news outlets have begun posting bits and pieces of the information online, but we wanted to summarize what we consider to be some of the main takeaways.
Key Takeaways:
The national average SAT score for the Class of 2018 rose to 1068 (536 Reading/Writing, 531 Math), a slight increase from 1060 last year.
Georgia’s average SAT score (public + private combined) had an average of 1064.
Georgia’s public school students for the Class of 2018 had an average score of 1054 (Reading/Writing 537, Math 517).
2.1 million students took the SAT this year, an increase of 25% from last year. This makes sense as the waters calmed from the big SAT transition in which we saw many students shy away due to not wanting to be guinea pigs for the new SAT format. During that SAT transition year, we saw our company temporarily operate at an extreme tilt of 85% ACT / 15% SAT. Things are now more balanced; we are currently seeing a split that is closer to 65% ACT / 35% SAT (based on students choosing their stronger test after taking mock tests of each exam).
The College Board notes that the SAT has taken the lead back in total number of test-takers, with 2 million compared to 1.9 million for the ACT.However, almost 1 million (almost half!) of these test-takers were students who took it during mandatory “SAT school day” testing, whereby entire districts of students are auto-enrolled to take the SAT during a school day administration, such as Atlanta Public Schools. Those built-in contractual 1 million students who took the School Day SAT make that claim probably accurate but a wee bit misleading.
Summary of performance for major counties and systems:
Fulton County – Average Score: 1091, +40 from last year
Cobb County – Average Score: 1107, +19 from last year
Either way, rather than focus on which test is “in the lead,” the best route for students to decide which test is better for them is to take a full-length, real mock test of both exams. We offer them weekly, and the full list of those tests will always be at this link. The two tests are like Visa and Mastercard: both are accepted everywhere equally. Simply identify your stronger test and put your efforts into studying for that test.
If you’re the parent of a junior, taking mocks soon is of the utmost priority, since approximately 7 of the 14 SAT and ACT junior-year test dates have registration deadlines that have already passed, and since many of the spring test dates for the SAT and ACT have conflicts with various school functions (spring break, prom, AP exams, final exams, state swimming championship, et al.) The list of mock tests is here.
https://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/winner.webp6661000Edison Prephttps://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Edison_Prep-logo.pngEdison Prep2018-10-15 17:30:422023-07-14 10:47:01The SAT Reclaims Its Lead As The More Popular Test* (Heavy on the asterisk)
The June 2018 SAT scores were released yesterday morning, and tutors’ phones and online student message boards such as Reddit and College Confidential instantly began to light up with seemingly unfathomable stories about an incredibly harsh curve on the June SAT test. Our first student text was “I missed 3 math questions and got a 720??? My last Blue Book test before the test I missed 8 and got a 750! Do you think [the College Board] messed up my score report? Should I call them?”
Unfortunately for the student, the score reported was not a misprint. In fact, many students scored far lower on the June SAT–despite missing fewer questions–than they scored on the real March 2018 or May 2018 SAT(s), or on tests from the College Board Blue Book.
What happened?
As the College Board saw it, the June test was intellectually far easier than previous tests. Without going into too much detail about how tests are designed, normed, and equated, this led to students getting dramatically more questions correct than on previous iterations of the SAT, which resulted in a much steeper curve than previous curves. This phenomenon was not new to the College Board; we covered this topic for the old-format SAT back in a 2013 blog post called “Curve Ball.” Essentially, when the whole nation does much better than expected, it creates a “traffic jam” at the top, and in order to maintain score consistency across test dates, they applied a more aggressive curve from the top down.
Both Silvia and I had supposed this might happen since we, as well as our professional tutor colleagues in Boston, DC,and elsewhere, had an unusual number of students reach out after the exam to say that the June test felt very easy and asking if others felt the same.
Let’s take a look at how the June 2018 Math test compared to other recent real exams:
The math curve was harsh. Missing one question dropped a student’s score to a 770 out of 800. Missing nine questions netted a 640. If you compare that to some of the tests in the official Blue Book, you could have missed literally double the number of questions (18) to get that same 640. It’s worth noting that the two 640’s — missing nine questions on June 2018 and 18 on some of the Blue Book tests — are equally likely. We tutor from the SAT Blue Book tests daily, and the tests that have the harsher curves in the Blue Book are intellectually easier, and vice versa, as they should be.
One important caveat is that this conversation is, for the most part, relevant just to the top 15% of the score curve. You can observe via the blue-colored row in the table above that by the time a student gets down to about 42 math questions correct (missing 16 questions), all math tests *except* the June 2018 one were within about 20 points of each other. The middle is the middle.
That’s admittedly not soothing for the top 15% scorers in a state in which the HOPE scholarship has propelled UGA’s average SAT score well into the mid-1300s (that top 15%). For those in the top 15%, and for those looking at highly selective schools that expect a top 15% score, those four questions that separated a 690 from a 770 on the June Math test mattered.
Why a harsher curve can be frustrating for top scorers is that the test is not just content knowledge. Missed questions can spring from misbubbling, a silly mistake, mis-allocating time on early questions and having to rush, or a host of other reasons. This kind of aggressive curve leaves less cushion for careless errors.
The College Board posted its official reply a day or two after the scores broke:
Luckily, this particularly tough curve occurred on the June test. Many rising seniors had already been planning to take the August or October test, and there’s technically four exams left for seniors. Rising juniors were mostly unaffected since they are a tiny portion of June testers.
Going forward, how should students unhappy with June scores react?
Students should register for the August test as soon as possible and keep their spirits up, reviewing before re-testing on August 25th. The June test was an anomaly compared to the other 20 tests, and the odds of a particularly easy test (especially given the media firestorm that has occurred due to the June test) are slim.
Going forward, how should families of rising sophomores and juniors plan and compensate for potentially unpredictable curves in the future?
Since it’s impossible to create tests that are exactly equal in difficulty, variability will continue to exist between each exam’s curve, and that is okay; it’s necessary for the test to be able to be accurately compared across months. Taking the test multiple times, or at least planning a student’s calendar in such a way that an additional test date or two is possible if needed, is the best way to hedge against the risk of an uncertain curve on a given test date. Higher scoring students are even more encouraged to do so, since there is far more variability in the top 15% of the score range than in the middle of the score range.
Ideally, any student who has done extensive practice should be actively hoping for an incredibly difficult test, since they’ll weather the storm relatively better than those students who simply walk in cold and wing it.
We have long told students that they should take mock tests of each test to determine the stronger test, and then analyze the test date calendar for the stronger test in order to figure out which portion of junior year has a span of 2-3 consecutive test dates to take the stronger test back to back. Doing so maintains momentum, and also protects against variability such as what we saw on the June 2018 exam. Only about 11% of our students in 2017 took the test once and chose to be “one and done,” with around 2.5 times being the average among our data and among tutoring colleagues with whom we compare notes. For that reason, students should plan on taking their first SAT between August of their junior year and March of their junior year to ensure at least three chances to take the SAT, if need be. (For the ACT, that same period would represent taking the first real exam between the September and February tests of junior year.)
Note: For the sake of brevity we did a deep dive into the June 2018 math curve for this blog post. The Reading/Writing section was also one of the most aggressive seen since the format switch in mid-2016. June 2018 was an aggressive curve on all three fronts (reading, grammar, and math).
https://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/test-scores.webp6661000Edison Prephttps://edisonprep.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Edison_Prep-logo.pngEdison Prep2018-07-12 17:31:132023-07-14 10:48:06The Curse of the Easy Test: A June 2018 SAT Case Study
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